All this talk about hitting your rails and chipping the paint or dings can all be put to rest after you see this video. I was at Jim’s shop, Tropical Blends and got a great video of him showing how durable his production Angulo stand up paddle board is by hitting it with a wooden stick and jumping on it up and down. Even the customer tries a jump or 2. If you have concerns about durability you need to see this video.

(click thumbnail to launch video)

Tropical Surf: I use this stick a lot, I actually use this stick to show the bottom contours. You can see it much easier if you… but basically, it’s a 1×1 or 2×1 or whatever it is but it’s a (____) stick. But anyway, if I just (banging). That’s pretty damn durable. You see the marks where the paint came off the blue stick but that’s about all.

Man: Try that with a regular surfboard.

Tropical Surf: Well, actually to tell you the truth, try that with – and I’d be really careful with what I say here because I don’t have the ability to make a fair judgment of other manufacturers. But I can say this particular manufacturer, there’s no seam here. That’s one of the major differences between this guy and some of the other guys. Basically what he does is he lays the bottom up and it wraps all the way around to the deck up to here. Then he puts the deck on it, so you have no seams that are coming down to the side of your deck. Now, this is obviously going to be the strongest point on the board, because you have wrap going around the rails. But that’s not to say that you can run this up on the reef or run over rocks with or whatever. But for hitting your paddle against it, and the kind of wear and turn you’re going to get from regular use with stand up surfing, this thing is really durable. This is not something that I recommend to everybody but it definitely proves the point. I’ll show you one more thing about it too that is very interesting. This is the 10’8” and this is another one that is in the black design. We call this the leaf deck design; this is the tattoo leaf design. This one weighs about 22 pounds and this one is 10’8”. But I’ll show you something about this that is kind of interesting. In order for this to work I need a little more rocker, a little more curve in the board. But as long as we’re talking about durability, right? We get some space underneath and then we’ll show you how they are. Really what you have here is a triple stringer. You have a type of construction that is really windsurfing from its roots. The things are just very durable. I like to think, and it all honesty; I truly believe that we’re sort of in the top category of manufacturing capabilities. You can try it if you want.

Man: All these epoxy business really sort of got going with windsurfing, didn’t it?

Tropical Surf: Yeah, exactly. It’s a natural transition because these guys are building bigger boards and this guy; the manufacturer has a really good following in Japan. Apparently, his company owns like 70 percent of the market for windsurfing in Japan. And the Japanese, I really believe that they are truly quality-conscious. And these boards aren’t mass-produced. This manufacturer can only make 300 a month, that’s 300 worldwide. 300 a month is nothing compared to what other people can do. I feel really confident, and if you look around the shop you kind of realize that we do kind of a custom to high-end, more high-end kind of product that’s why we went with these guys.